Op-Ed: Activists disappointed by Cal moves at Gill Tract

People in Occupy the Farm work on the Gil Tract in Albany. Photo: Occupy the Farm

Activists who have been advocating for an urban farm at the Gill Tract in Albany say they are disappointed by a recent decision by UC Berkeley to raze crops they planted this fall. The Gill Tract is closed to the public but activists have been trying since earlier this year to convince the university to open the locked research field to the community. Activists have continued to force entry into the Gill Tract throughout 2012, and recently planted winter greens and a fava bean cover crop.

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Thank you so much for this information. It is useful in understanding what we are witnessing. I had not given proper attention to this being a “gown-on-gown” political skirmish.

guest

UC Berkeley should fire Professor Altieri for his involvement with this scam.

guest

Oh my. The Altieri Op-Ed is alarming. I’m not sure that (as another guest suggested) he should be fired for what he has done and said, but judging by the coherence of his vision and his statement of his vision, he certainly should not be rewarded.

guest

Ironically, his best defense of his job would be “academic freedom.”

guest

Perhaps you should submit an article on this important subject.

former_student

What amazed me is how easy this stuff was to dig up and how the local (and national) media failed to connect the dots (although if you read the comments section in some of the Patch articles it’s pretty clear that plenty of the locals did). The idea that these professors should be able to directly threaten their colleagues work and then be rewarded for it should bother any fair-minded person, whatever their political position.

guest

These are boring people. Honestly, I think that is the thing most of these activists are scared of. Not that they will be attacked by the cops (although they do love that), or vilified by their opponents, but that what they do doesn’t matter. Well, it really doesn’t. They aren’t on the cutting edge of change, they aren’t scaring the powers that be, they aren’t at the vanguard of a new social reality. They are just a bunch of washed up old Marxist professors who have joined up with a bunch of naive kids to play at a half-understood echo of something that most of their grandparents HAD to do whether they liked it or not. What a sad group of losers, egged on by yuppie foodies who won’t actually sacrifice anything for their “cause”, pathetically pushing for subsistence farming as some kind of a solution for an imagined problem. As if they will every convince poor African Americans and Mexican Americans to return to subsistence farming in the city as a solution to poverty. Right, guys. Because it works in Cuba. Sad, boring, and achingly stupid. But because you broke the law and fucked with people that actually work for a living, the rest of us are supposed to take you seriously. I don’t think so.

guest

The street in front of your house is public property, and I hate bicyclists because they are rude assholes who can’t manage to stop at stop lights and wear spandex made in China. Would preventing bicyclists from driving down your street be civil disobedience?

guest

Gee, Charles. I think property is theft and you have more money than me. Can I have your house?

guest

If the odd proposals poorly presented in this Op-Ed are the product of boredom, may I never to experience it.